What's the easiest way to get the current location of an iPhone?

Question

I already know how to use the CLLocationManager, so I could do it the hard way, with delegates and all that.

But I'd like to have a convenience method that just gets the current location, once, and blocks until it gets the result.

Answer 1

What I do is implement a singleton class to manage updates from core location. To access my current location, I do a CLLocation *myLocation = [[LocationManager sharedInstance] currentLocation]; If you wanted to block the main thread you could do something like this:

while ([[LocationManager sharedInstance] locationKnown] == NO){
   //blocking here
   //do stuff here, dont forget to have some kind of timeout to get out of this blocked    //state
}

However, as it has been already pointed out, blocking the main thread is probably not a good idea, but this can be a good jumping off point as you are building something. You will also notice that the class I wrote checks the timestamp on location updates and ignores any that are old, to prevent the problem of getting stale data from core location.

This is the singleton class I wrote. Please note that it is a little rough around the edges:

#import <CoreLocation/CoreLocation.h>
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

@interface  LocationController : NSObject <CLLocationManagerDelegate> {
    CLLocationManager *locationManager;
    CLLocation *currentLocation;
}

+ (LocationController *)sharedInstance;

-(void) start;
-(void) stop;
-(BOOL) locationKnown;

@property (nonatomic, retain) CLLocation *currentLocation;

@end
@implementation LocationController

@synthesize currentLocation;

static LocationController *sharedInstance;

+ (LocationController *)sharedInstance {
    @synchronized(self) {
        if (!sharedInstance)
            sharedInstance=[[LocationController alloc] init];       
    }
    return sharedInstance;
}

+(id)alloc {
    @synchronized(self) {
        NSAssert(sharedInstance == nil, @"Attempted to allocate a second instance of a singleton LocationController.");
        sharedInstance = [super alloc];
    }
    return sharedInstance;
}

-(id) init {
    if (self = [super init]) {
        self.currentLocation = [[CLLocation alloc] init];
        locationManager = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init];
        locationManager.delegate = self;
        [self start];
    }
    return self;
}

-(void) start {
    [locationManager startUpdatingLocation];
}

-(void) stop {
    [locationManager stopUpdatingLocation];
}

-(BOOL) locationKnown { 
     if (round(currentLocation.speed) == -1) return NO; else return YES; 
}

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didUpdateToLocation:(CLLocation *)newLocation fromLocation:(CLLocation *)oldLocation {
    //if the time interval returned from core location is more than two minutes we ignore it because it might be from an old session
    if ( abs([newLocation.timestamp timeIntervalSinceDate: [NSDate date]]) < 120) {     
        self.currentLocation = newLocation;
    }
}

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didFailWithError:(NSError *)error {
    UIAlertView *alert;
    alert = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"Error" message:[error description] delegate:nil cancelButtonTitle:@"OK" otherButtonTitles:nil];
    [alert show];
    [alert release];
}

-(void) dealloc {
    [locationManager release];
    [currentLocation release];
    [super dealloc];
}

@end